


Conspicuous in Its Absence

by valdomarx (cptxrogers)



Series: Octoberfest fics [18]
Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Angst, Insecure Jaskier | Dandelion, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Post-Episode: S01E06 Rare Species
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:40:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27087247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cptxrogers/pseuds/valdomarx
Summary: After the mountain, Geralt catches glimpses of Jaskier everywhere he goes.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: Octoberfest fics [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1956754
Comments: 28
Kudos: 385





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> geraskier hallows prompt: ghosts

After the mountain, Geralt keeps catching maddening glimpses. A riot of colour up ahead on the road, which turns out to be a cart full of fabric, or whiff of lavender, which is just plants growing wild in a nearby field. A wild peal of laughter which rings in his ears and has him whipping his head around only to find some unfamiliar stranger sharing a joke.

It’s a torment of tantalisation: Each time to be convinced that what he seeks is just around the corner, and each time to realise that he’s wrong. 

Worst of all is when he hears music, plucked notes ringing out through a village, and he’ll hurry to the nearest tavern, heart thumping in his chest, and he’ll push his way inside only to find some other bard singing some other song.

He asks around as he travels but no one has seen that particular bard ( _his_ bard, he thinks and then reprimands himself for thinking). He clearly doesn’t want to be found, and somehow that aches even more than his absence. 

Still, Geralt sees him everywhere: In a foppish young lordling whose father hires him for a contact, and he can barely pay attention to the details of the job because he’s captivated by the way the lordling’s wavy brown hair sweeps across his forehead. In the soft, padding footsteps of the bath attendant who works at the local bathhouse, approaching Geralt with care. But this care is born of trepidation, not of tenderness, and that twists into something ugly and resentful under his ribs. In the sparkling blue eyes of a barmaid, whom Geralt stares at for too long, making her squirm under his intense focus.

The days seem to be greyer and the nights colder without company, without a warming presence to brighten them. He feels less man and more machine: Find a contact, kill a monster, get paid, rinse and repeat. He start disconnecting from himself, looking on with emotionless detachment as he takes a job, travels, takes another. He’d lived like this for decades after Blaviken, but he feels how cold and empty it is now he has something else to compare it to.

He’s in a village, another stop on the Path, grey like every other, when he hears the gentle sound of a lute and even though he knows he shouldn’t, he lets hope surge in his breast and quickens his pace. He pushes open the door to the tavern and all at once is assaulted by colour and sound and scent, teal and lavender and _the story is this_.

Jaskier doesn’t look up as he enters, too focused on his performance, and Geralt takes a moment to just bask, like a creature warming itself in the sun, music and passion and _life_ streaming into him like a shard of light bursting through a cloudy sky. His heart hammers as fast as a human’s, relief and terror and shame and want coursing through him, and he’d forgotten what it was like to feel so much.

Jaskier finishes his song, the final notes resonating through the thick tavern air, and for a second he looks wistful before smiling at the crowd’s applause. 

Geralt’s heart seems to want to beat out of his chest but he’s frozen by the doorway, unable to move, unable to think. And then, as everything around him grinds to a silent halt, from across the room, their eyes meet.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the mountain, Jaskier tries to compose music and himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the interest in this ficlet and in a continuation! I may well come back to this one to add a third part in the future.
> 
> This is for Alex's prompts day 26: i think i've broken something

It’s been months since the mountain, and Jaskier is trying to heal. He knows logically that what Geralt said was untrue. He knows Geralt’s woes aren’t his fault, that he was lashing out because of his own hurt and guilt over Yennefer. He understands that. He forgives that, even.

So he travels onward. He sings of Geralt’s adventures like he always does. He composes new songs.

But everything he writes is dreck: maudlin, self-pitying, and flat.

The problem is that Geralt’s words struck something deeper inside him, a festering anxiety he’s never been able to quash. Because he _is_ a burden, really, isn’t he? Can’t fight, can’t hunt, can only earn coin where people have it to spare. He’s known it all his life, which is why he tries so terribly hard to be entertaining. Perhaps, he used to think, if he was charming enough, if he was diverting enough, people wouldn’t notice what a hindrance he was. Perhaps they’d think it was a trade worth making.

He’d convinced himself it was that way with Geralt. That he brought something worthwhile to Geralt’s life, some colour and music, even though Geralt never expressed any affection for those things. As if a few meager coins from odd performances and a few sugar-spun tales about witchers’ heroic deeds could be recompense for tolerating him.

Clearly, he was wrong. There was nothing he had that Geralt needed, and it seemed nothing that he wanted either.

Jaskier is not unfamiliar with the pain of unrequited love. It has happened more times than he can count that he has laid eyes on some beautiful stranger, some compelling vision, someone with whom he has fallen instantly in love, only for them to return his gaze with an upturned lip and an expression of distaste.

But this is wholly different from those fleeting hurts. This is years, decades, of devotion to a man who only ever tolerated his presence at best. What Jaskier feels, most of all, is stupid, and embarrassed, and lonely in a way that has settled into a dull, flat ache in the pit of his stomach.

His new attempts at work are all disasters, so eventually in desperation he digs out the old notebook he’s been carefully avoiding and finds the song he’d been working on before the dragon hunt. The lyrics are all wrong but the melody is solid, and sad, and playing it feels cathartic even when it hurts, like binding a wound to staunch the bleeding.

_The fairer sex, they often call it  
But her love’s as unfair as a crook  
_

It’s petty, and a little mean, but it’s satisfying to lay those words out on the page. She was always bad news. He hadn’t been wrong about that. He lets himself write more. As if he can transpose his pain onto Yennefer, to purge himself by reworking the story so it’s her fault. It’s not true, but it feels good to pretend for a moment.

_Tell me love, tell me love  
How is that just?_

It’s the phrase that’s been drumming in his head for weeks. It’s not _just_ , it’s not _fair_ , it’s not _right_ that he should feel this way. He knows this is a fiction too - since when has their world had any interest in justice? - but he’s enjoying the pretense. As he writes, though, inevitably he can’t help but show himself.

_I’m weak my love, and I am wanting_

He stares at the line.

He scribbles it out. It’s too obvious. Too crass. Too revealing.

He writes it back in. It’s true.

He finishes the song that night. He plays it the next day, both to rip the wax from the wound and simply because he has no other material. The audience seems to like it, the young women especially. He tells them it’s about doomed love which, of course, it is.

He plays it often from then on. He’d imagined playing it might lessen the knot of shame and misery in his chest, but it doesn’t. He keeps playing it anyway.

He keeps playing until, one chilly autumn evening in a small village, he’s wrapping up the evening with the song, looking forward to a quiet ale and a soft bed for once. He barely registers the faces in the tavern, the _shhh shhh_ of the door swinging open and closed. He barely notices anything at all until he sounds the final notes, lets them ring through the smoky air, and looks up to find an achingly familiar figure in the doorway: dark cloak, white hair, two big scary swords.

His heart twists violently as their eyes meet across the room, amber on blue, and there’s an expression on that familiar face not of anger but something akin to curiosity. To puzzlement. To wondering _what the fuck was that he was singing about?_

Suddenly there’s not enough air in the room and his skin is crawling and it’s too much, all too much, and something inside his chest rips and cracks. There is something fundamentally broken here, and he thinks it must be him.


End file.
